William Morris Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Morris

Much praised in his own lifetime for the "sweetness" of his lyrics, compared to Chaucer as a narrative poet, and seriously considered as a successor to Tennyson in the laureateship, William Morris has subsequently often been disparaged for writing poetry which, in Henry James's words, evokes a world where the reader has "neither to choose, to criticize, nor to believe, but simply to feel, to look, and to listen." Morris's evocation of a sturdy and practical medieval world functions, however, as a criticism of his own time and an expression of hope for radical change to produce a nonbourgeois, non-capitalist world in the future. In addition, his poetry has historical interest within the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for Morris's first book, The Defence of Guenevere, was published a dozen years before Dante Gabriel Rossetti's first volume of verse, Poems (1870). Morris's versification is also of substantial historical interest, for he develops the irregular, lightened rhythms of the Spasmodics in both octosyllabic and decasyllabic couplets, experiments with alliterative measure in Love Is Enough and his translation of Beowulf, and creates an original form of hexameter in Sigurd the Volsung.

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